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| Joel Tenebaum File-Sharing Case Heard at Court of Appeal Posted: 05 Apr 2011 04:36 AM PDT
By July 2010, a very different picture began to emerge on the scale of the punishments against the Boston student. Judge Nancy Gertner ruled in Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum that the awarded damages were excessive and unconstitutional. She promptly reduced the jury-awarded damages by 90%. Although the court had reduced the jury's award from the original $675,000 ($22,500 per infringed work) to $67,500 ($2,250 per infringed work) for the unlawful sharing of 30 songs, the case was far from over. Tenenbaum slammed the new reduced amount branding it "equally as insane" as the previous year's $675,000 decision. He went on to lodge an appeal and the RIAA, who were equally unhappy with the decision, followed suit. Yesterday both parties were back in court, this time in Boston before the First Circuit Court of Appeal. The issue at hand is the exact amount Tenenbaum will be expected to pay for his previously admitted illicit file-sharing. The hearing took place before a three-judge panel consisting of Chief Judge Sandra L. Lynch, Judge Juan R. Torruella, and Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson. Tenenbaum’s lawyers argued for lower damages (they’re aiming for around $30, $1 per track) on several points, including that the laws applied to the Tenenbaum case were never intended to target non-commercial entities and even if they were, the damages in the case are “unconstitutionally excessive”. Lawyers for the RIAA argued that damages awards of this scale are there for their deterrent effect and that they were intended all along for infringers such as Tenenbaum. Massachusetts attorney Joel Sage, who was at the hearing yesterday, reports that although there were some positive signs, in his opinion Tenenbaum faces an uphill battle. “Chief Judge Lynch clearly had no tolerance for the defense's contention that ‘no one thought’ the statutory penalties for copyright infringement would ever apply to ‘consumers’,” he wrote. “She pointed out that the statute appeared to apply to consumers, eliciting a concession from Tenenbaum's counsel that statutory copyright penalties were not facial unconstitutional,” he continued. “This left the defense with little more than a half-hearted argument that the jury verdict was improper here because the copyright statute originally contemplated damage calculations by judges.” On the other hand, judges Torruella and Thompson were reportedly “more suspicious” of the record labels' arguments. “Judge Torruella asked the labels' lawyer whether ‘lost sales’ would provide a useful measure of damages, to which he replied that damages should be commensurate with the ‘lost of value of the copyright’. He argued that file-sharing in the aggregate caused enormous economic losses to the labels because it essentially put the music ‘in the public domain’.” Sage reasonably questions why Tenenbaum should be then held responsible for the onward actions of file-sharers, a question that was never posed to the RIAA lawyer in court. As reported by Boston.com, after yesterday’s hearing Tenenbaum was pleased at the support he’d received from people of his generation who share his passion for the legal issues at stake in this case. Noting that one of the circuit judges actually had to ask how file-sharing programs work, Tenenbaum said: "That's really the crux of the issue here. That was the center of the whole argument: Was Congress even aware of file sharing' when it passed the deterrence act?” A decision in the case is not expected for several months. |
| The Pirate Bay Tops 5 Million Registered Users Posted: 04 Apr 2011 02:01 PM PDT
In the months leading up to the raid the US Government threatened to put Sweden on the WTO's black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, with John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA, writing a letter to Sweden's Secretary of State in which he stated, "It is certainly not in Sweden's best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated." The pressure worked and The Pirate Bay’s servers went down, but to the disappointment of the entertainment industries this only lasted for three days. Instead of calling it quits The Pirate Bay founders fought back, and in an ironic twist all the attention from the press due to legal troubles helped grow the site to what it is today – the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet. Apparently it’s easier to overthrow governments than to take a website down. At the time of the raid The Pirate Bay had only a few hundred thousand registered users, but with the spotlight on the deviant Swedes, the user count soon skyrocketed. At the start of July 2006 the site broke the magical milestone of one million registered users, and that was just the beginning. Today, despite numerous court cases, blocking attempts by ISPs and two full trials at the Stockholm Court, The Pirate Bay has welcomed its 5 millionth user. Quite a remarkable achievement for a site that doesn’t even require registration to download. Day in and day out, a few thousand new users sign up for an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site. There is of course also a downside to the ever growing list of users, as the site’s popularity also makes it a huge target for spammers who want to pass off their fake torrents pointing to malware. TorrentFreak talked to one of the Pirate Bay moderators, who said that indeed hundreds of ‘spam’ accounts and fake uploads have to be deleted every day. Needless to say, without the moderator team the site would become pretty much be unusable in a matter of days. Yes, The Pirate Bay also has several algorithms to spot the obvious spammers, but even after this first screening hundreds of torrents have to be removed manually. The current moderator team exists of about 40 people, half of which are full moderators and the other half so-called ‘helpers’. Together these people remove numerous fake torrents and spam accounts every day, abiding to a strict take-down policy that does not cover copyrighted material. The big question is whether the site will live to welcome its 10 millionth user in a few years from now. The community and moderators – who all work for free – is certainly large enough, but the pressure from the entertainment industry on ISPs and governments is ever increasing. But then again, this never stopped The Pirate Bay before. |
Joel Tenenbaum’s case against the RIAA refuses to go away and has already been dragging on since 2005. In 2009, a jury found Tenenbaum guilty of "willful infringement" and awarded damages of $675,000.
May 31, 2006, only two years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in the outskirts of Stockholm. The officers were tasked with | You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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